Here are a couple of items to take in together. First, here is a bit from Friday’s Countdown with Ken Vogel of Politico. Vogel essentially makes the point that “astroturfers” like the guys behind Tea Party Express primarily are using the movement to promote themselves and raise their own profiles as political and campaign consultants. Those fellows and a lot of other “leaders” of the allegedly grassroots movement have long political histories, but the tea party activists themselves generally are people who didn’t pay much attention to politics until the day before yesterday. And so for the most part the activists are unaware that they’re being manipulated by a pack of Establishment figures even as they rail against the Establishment.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

At Newshoggers, John Ballard takes up a similar theme.

I watched a Christine O’Donnell video by “anna missed”. Innocent viewers who just came from Sunday School, knowing none of the back story about this woman, will have nothing but a positive reaction to what she says. Never mind that along with Beck, Palin and the rest of the crowd she is blowing smoke. Just because the words are as devoid of content as cotton candy it is a mistake to mock and point at those who buy them. There is a market for cotton candy, too, you know.

She’s telegenic, speaks without profanity and uses all the right images, knowing instinctively how to push the right buttons and wave the right flags. Anybody trying to follow this video (or other rhetorical fluff) with hit pieces will only succeed in looking vindictive. The point was made in a comment aimed at me by one of their number just yesterday. Closed minds are as durable as epoxy.

I live in a place where Glenn Beck is cited in sermons as a courageous man and a spokesperson for God. When a certain population of sincere Christians look up from the pages of their bibles they may not understand what they have read, but their minds and opinions are as malleable as those of children. They have been taught from childhood to hear and respect their leaders.

Please do read the whole post. It’s very good.

A lot of us have been saying that the tea party movement doesn’t seem to have any real cause behind it; just fluffy and meaningless rhetoric. Some righties objected when I wrote that, so I asked a couple of them to articulate what the movement stands for, beyond T-shirt sales, and they couldn’t do it. They could cough back the empty slogans they obviously didn’t understand and express their feelings about current events, but they couldn’t explain the movement’s cause. I’m not sure they understood what I meant by a “cause.”

While we wonder at people who wear T-shirts and golf caps promoting “liberty” even as they willingly march into serfdom, I admit Ballard is right that mocking them them makes them even more enslaved to their manipulators.

Unfortunately, trying to reason with them doesn’t work, either.

Ballard finishes by saying,

There is no way that knowledge will ever trump belief systems. Those who think these people are nothing but a bunch of kooks who will soon go away do so at their political peril.

I don’t know anyone who thinks they will soon go away. I certainly don’t.

The tea partiers themselves are lost to reason, so there is no point trying to change their minds. A small percentage of them eventually will wake up and realize they’re being had, but most never will, no matter what happens. That’s the reality of the thing. The best we can do is try to keep Congress from completely going over to the Dark Side in November and try somehow to reach Americans who aren’t committed to a “side.” And I think that publicizing the weirder aspects of candidates like Christine O’Donnell is one way to do that.

Update: One more video — possibly the most brilliant 44 seconds in any film, ever, of all time.

Update: Right on time — a profile of Sal Russo, the head of Tea Party Express. So the head of this allegedly rogue organization has insider connections going back to the Reagan Administration. Further, there is an appearance that tea party donations have turned into a cash cow for Russo —

Mr. Russo’s group, based in California, is now the single biggest independent supporter of Tea Party candidates, raising more than $5.2 million in donations since January 2009, according to federal records. But at least $3 million of that total has since been paid to Mr. Russo’s political consulting firm or to one controlled by his wife, according to federal records.

One suspects Russo doesn’t care if Christine O’Donnell is a serious politician or a ham sandwich.

Mr. Russo’s group is also under attack from Republican Party leaders in Delaware, who have accused the Tea Party Express of improperly collaborating with Ms. O’Donnell’s campaign. Federal laws allow political action committees to support candidates independently, but they are not permitted to coordinate their spending with campaigns. … the campaign finance records for the Tea Party Express also showed payments totaling more than $10,000 for stays at casino hotels, as well as bills for meals at expensive restaurants near Mr. Russo’s offices, including nearly $5,000 at Chops Steak House, which former staff members said the Tea Party Express frequented after work.

Oh, but they are restoring honor to America, aren’t they?

Christine O’Donnell’s supporters have no idea why we are laughing at them. Indeed, I’m not sure they even realize we are laughing at them.

For example, Jeff G. thinks that much of the leftie blogosphere has embedded the O’Donnell “witchcraft” video because we think it will end her political career. For example, Jeff G. writes at Protein Wisdom:

Wow. No, really, wow.

Christine O’Donnell’s candidacy is evidently dead because of something she said on “Politically Incorrect” (quick, take note of the show’s freakin’ name) in the 1990s — but only because Tea Partiers are evidently small-minded religious bigots who will be so OUTRAGED by this ANTI-CHRISTIAN DEMON WORSHIP that they’ll forget all about fiscal conservatism and smaller government and remain home election night, allowing an unrequited Marxist to win the state.

At least, that’s the argument — and it’s one that speaks poorly of the small-minded religious bigots who have essentially just KILLED O’Donnell’s candidacy with their small-minded religiosity. Meaning, those who backed her. The Tea Partiers.

But no, that’s not why I embedded it, and it’s not why I’m laughing at Jeff G. and other O’Donnell apologists. I’m laughing because they take her seriously at all. I’m laughing because they think she actually gives a hoo haw about “fiscal conservatism and smaller government.”

It’s obvious from her own history that O’Donnell is to fiscal responsibility what Charles Manson is to sainthood. The manager of a previous campaign said that O’Donnell used campaign money for personal expenses but did not want to pay her staff. Another former staffer from her 2008 campaign said she spent campaign money stupidly and was more interested in getting a media contract than winning the election.

Also in 2008, she blew a large part of her meager campaign funds on an expensive trip to the Republican National Convention, apparently believing she would be asked to give the keynote address. And she traveled to California for a fundraiser that raised less money than her trip cost. And then the campaign office phone was cut off because she failed to pay the phone bill, so she was making campaign calls from her parents’ home.

Yet because she is able to recite all of the right buzz words about cutting taxes and budgets, her groupies honestly believe she will be an effective force for fiscal conservatism in Washington.

This brings to mind what Delaware Republican Party chairman Tom Ross said of O’Donnell: “I could buy a parrot and train it to say, ‘tax cuts,’ but at the end of the day, it’s still a parrot, not a conservative.”

It’s blatantly obvious O’Donnell is a manipulative attention junkie who has been using election campaigning at a self-promotional tool and a source of personal income.

O’Donnell’s revelation that she “dabbled in witchcraft” (assuming she wasn’t making that story up on the spot just to get more air time), to me, is more evidence of her lack of seriousness than anything else. Face it; the woman is a walking sideshow carnival.

But Little Lulu is steaming with fury at Bill Maher, alleging that he somehow edited the video (which you can watch in the previous post) to leave out the “context” in which she says she opposes witchcraft because she tried it and rejected it. But the trying and rejecting part is in the video. What was left out is that O’Donnell had first said she is against Hallowe’en.

This makes her seem less of a flake, how, exactly?

And then Lulu says, “Focus on the campaign, the voters of Delaware, and the bearded Marxist opponent who’s the real out-of-touch extremist in the race.” Chris Coons doesn’t have a beard on his website (the only bearded candidate I know of is the tea party candidate for Senate from Alaska) and Coons is no Marxist.[Update: Now I know that Coons called himself a “bearded Marxist” in a college paper he wrote in 1985. However, righties, he is not a Marxist now, however much you have been brainwashed to believe he is.] But while Coons may be “out of touch” with conservative ideology, as most people with critical thinking skills are, O’Donnell is out of touch with Planet Earth.

Mice with fully functioning human brains? Wow. No, really, wow.